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On the Performance of Clock Synchronization Algorithms for a Distributed Commodity Audio System

Today's commodity infrastructure (computer hardware, operating system and networking) does not provide the accurate synchronization needed for playback and recording of highly correlated audio, such as multi-channel sound. The presented work explores the performance of two synchronization algorithms that are applicable for the commodity infrastructure. We have implemented the algorithms and compared the achievable accuracy, scalability, processing requirements and communication bandwidth requirements in the context of 100baseT switched Ethernet and 802.11b Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN).